Tanay Kothari✓

these are the 4 most important questions to ask when deciding on a co-founder: (these have worked wonders for @SahajGarg6 and i) >do you care about working on the same problems? if not, you pull the company in different directions. disaster waiting to happen. >do you share the same values? ours were integrity and being customer first. that meant no ads inside our products, and making product experience the #1 thing. >do you want to work with the same kind of people? we chose a small, extremely capable team of people who inspire us professionally, and are a joy to be around. >do you complement each other? if you make decisions fast, you might want a co-founder who decides more slowly. if you're shy and don't like talking to a lot of people, that's fine, but you probably need a co-founder who's more extroverted. these will help you pick a person that you can build a massive company with, and enjoy it along the way. — written with @WisprFlow

i'm often asked, "do you think i have pmf?" my answer is always the same: "if you're asking that question, you probably don't." when you hit pmf, you won't have to ask. people will love your product so much that you'll hear it directly from them. we found this out firsthand at wispr when we heard that people were buying macbooks just to be able to use flow. you can't fake pmf or people loving your product, and it will be obvious when that happens. until then, keep building. ship, collect feedback, ship again — written with @WisprFlow

RT @gauravvohra: Tanay Kothari (@tankots), CEO of @WisprFlow, has the cleanest definition of brand I've heard: You shouldn't just think "voice" when you hear "Wispr Flow" You should think "Wispr Flow" when you hear the word "voice" Sports shoes → Nike Coffee → Starbucks Voice → Wispr Flow

when we raised our seed round years ago, i actually told investors exactly how we *could* fail. i'm generally a no bs person, so i wanted to lay all the cards out. the pitch had 3 parts: -here's what we think this could become -here's what we know so far -here are all the risks for how this company could fail i told them in a meeting, "you could tell me 5 risks you see. i'll tell you 100, because we've done the work to understand all 100." we raised $4.5m a couple of weeks later, and the journey started. investors aren't stupid. they hear pitches all day, and they can tell when a founder is hiding the downside. so if you're looking to raise: don't oversell the upside, and definitely don't hide the downside. honesty wins. — written with @WisprFlow

2 years ago, i had done zero marketing. i'd been an engineer my entire life. when i told a founder friend we were building a consumer product, he told me, "tanay, you don't have that consumer dna. you don't know how to build a brand. you shouldn't do this." it sounded like a fun challenge. game on. 2 months after we pivoted Wispr from hardware to Flow, our first launch did millions of views and hit #1 on product hunt for the day and the week. what i've learned about marketing since: 1/ take almost no inspiration from others. standing out means doing things your own way. be unique and bold in your decisions. 2/ pick your first users by who will cause PLG. hundreds of avatars of people loved wispr flow. we focused on 2. developers, because they post about tools they love everywhere. founders, because they roll them out to their whole team. 3/ make every user feel it was built for people like them. most tools assume american english. in wispr you can pick british english, swiss german, or simplified vs traditional chinese 4/ build small moments that make people feel seen. in india, after you've spoken 1,000 words in an indian language, a banner says congratulations in that language, with the flag 5/ do pr even if you can't measure it. if i put its roi in a spreadsheet, the column would be empty. but asking what i'd pitch a journalist about every new feature gives us a lot of our ad ideas 6/ make the message something you can see, touch, feel. have fun with it. we said we'd kill the keyboard, so i sawed one in half in our office for a launch video 7/ treat word of mouth as a science, not an art. after we hit product-market fit, the first thing we optimized for was getting every user to tell their friends turns out you don't need consumer dna or to be the most creative. you just need to treat marketing like a science.

most ai products right now are built for the 5% of people who are tech savvy. my dad is never going to write a system prompt. my grandfather doesn't even know what a prompt is. that means it's the best time ever to use ai and build products for the other 95%.

the 4 things i look for in every hire: 1/ a strong first-principles thinker. someone who works out why something is true instead of repeating what's usually done. twenty years of experience often teaches you what's "supposed" to work. i want people who check whether it does 2/ high cpu. some people call it high iq. i think of it as how quickly you can absorb new information and have a conversation about it. at a startup, what you need to know changes every few months, so speed of learning matters more than what you already know 3/ high eq. it shows up as self-awareness and low ego. the biggest difference i see between an extremely smart intern and an average one is how quickly they learn from feedback, and you can't learn from feedback if your ego gets in the way 4/ obsession. is there something you're deeply, madly obsessed with? i've been obsessed with the same question since i was 10. what does the next generation of computing look like? the people who do their best work here usually have a question like that experience isn't on the list. we get applications from staff engineers and principal scientists all the time. one of our best engineers was a 20-year-old with no fancy resume who dm'd me on a saturday, came into the office 2 hours later, and shipped a full feature by sunday morning. aptitude > experience — written with @WisprFlow

every leader's job is to make sure the hardest thing their team deals with is the work itself, not bureaucracy or feeling unappreciated. when i was right out of college, i learned this the hard way. i'd never managed anyone before and i was running a 25-person team, most of them older than me. in my first month as a manager, i messed up so badly that someone on my team cried and almost quit. this was a huge turning point for me. i knew in that moment that i needed to learn how to be responsible for people. that means giving them clear guidance and mentorship. it also means staying out of their way a lot of the time. here's 5 practical ways i do that now: 1/ one day a month, i shadow someone on my team for a few hours. then we map what's blocking them and fix it together, and apply it to the rest of their department 2/ in a new hire's first 2 weeks, i walk them through how i prioritize and why. most companies fail to scale because new hires don't understand how the founder thinks, or worse, the direction of the company 3/ with senior people, i define the problem and stay out of how they solve it. early on at wispr when we needed better ads, our cmo built 100 of them himself in figma, tested them, then brought in a team to scale it 4/ when someone needs to grow fast, i give them one thing to own and 30 minutes with me every day. this allowed a 24-year-old on our team to go from small experiments to managing engineers in 8 weeks 5/ i hand off what i used to control. i was deeply involved in every marketing launch we did for a long time. for notetaker, i told our cmo "i trust you with this. we've worked together long enough." taking care of your team is priority number 1 — written with @WisprFlow

i've been writing code since i was 10. i've barely written a single line in the last year. claude or astra writes it. i read it and make sure i understand it. for a couple of months that really hurt. i'd spent most of my life getting good at writing code, and it felt like that skill had become useless. i know a lot of engineers that felt the same at first, including people on my team. but on the other hand, it is such an exciting time to build right now. the tools available are awesome. i'm starting to realize that all those years of coding still matter. engineers can use their experience to guide a lot more work at once. today every engineer at wispr runs 5 to 10 agents in parallel, and we're shipping faster than ever. i don't think anyone feels sad about not writing code anymore. — written with @WisprFlow

hey twitter for everyone new here, a quick reintro: i'm tanay, co-founder and ceo of @WisprFlow • grew up in delhi • at 11, built one of the first voice assistants with a friend. 2.5m users, then got shut down • built 60-70 more products before college • at 15, became cto of a startup out of india's first incubator • stanford cs, where i met my co-founder @sahajgarg6 on day one • started wispr in 2021 building a brain-computer interface. 3 years in, we decided to pivot • what we built instead is Wispr Flow, now used by millions of people to write with their voice i'm going to be posting here a lot more to share what we're learning, and what we're building (including the parts we haven't figured out yet) if you're in the arena or want to be, welcome :)

this is so cool, thank you @RobertGreene ❤️

Wispr Flow + Astra on an airplane with no neighbors beside me is my fav experience of all time

this is everything you need to know to start a company from zero this video covers how to: 1. identify your "why" 2. find a co-founder that aligns with your "why" 3. come up with ideas and test them 4. raise capital 5. achieve PMF and repeatedly launch successfully if you want to build a company, this is for you

HUGE

Pretty cool moment for us at Owled. We helped launch Apple Pay in India, taking this video end-to-end, from planning and strategy to production and final execution. A lot went into getting this one right, and the team absolutely killed it. Big kudos to everyone at Owled who made this launch happen!

a 24 year old led the engineering behind our second product ever. it sounds insane, but it's been one of the best decisions we've made. he was only a couple of years out of college. one day i pulled him aside and told him i needed him to own this product for the next two months. the team working on this started very small. what i needed for notetaker was someone with real intellectual horsepower who was fast at building. i didn't need them to be experienced. he started with small experiments and two months later he had helped design how the product worked, the systems it runs on, and was managing other engineers on the project. that's 2-4 years of promotions at any other tech company, done in eight weeks. the only thing i did was meet with him for 30 minutes a day. young and inexperienced aren't the same thing. someone hungry to grow, sitting next to someone who can pull them forward, moves faster than you'd ever expect. we're hiring people with these qualities now more than ever.

We have a few core beliefs at Wispr that guide everything we do. One of them is that you should be able to dictate wherever you are in the world. That means understanding you in a busy coffee shop, with a conversation happening at the next desk, or when you’re speaking quietly in a shared office space. That's why, today, we're introducing our latest speech model, Canto. It's the first in a rapid series of speech models we’re building to make that belief a reality. We built it specifically around those everyday conditions. On our evaluation of 10 hours of English-language Wispr Flow dictations from more than 2,300 speakers, it achieved a 3.4% word error rate—the lowest among the models we tested. We’re moving into a voice-led future, and I’m happy to share a closer look at the work our team is doing to get us there. Learn more about Canto here:

There's always a trade-off that comes in between quality, scope, and time. The way that we run this inside Wispr is: Quality comes first Time comes second Scope comes third If something is not up to the Wispr bar, we just push the deadline further away. We don't ship it if it's not meeting the quality bar. However, what we can do is reduce scope. We can ship a very narrow thing that's very high quality. I would rather do that than ship a lot of features of lower quality. UX always comes first.

Today is an exciting one: Notetaker is now live on Windows. When we launched Notetaker, I wrote about how much we hate messy meeting notes. We wanted something that gets the details right and makes it easy to push your work forward. That becomes especially useful a few meetings later. You’re writing a proposal and need to remember what the customer asked for. You’re planning next week and want to check which decisions are still open. The context you need is spread across several conversations. With Notetaker, you can ask questions across your recorded meetings and get answers with links back to the source. Your personal dictionary helps it recognize the names and terminology you use at work, making those conversations easier to follow when you come back to them. You can also bring that meeting context into your AI tool of choice, alongside the documents you’re already working with. A conversation with a customer can inform a proposal. A discussion with your team can become the starting point for a project plan. So much of our work starts with something someone said. We want that context to stay useful as the work develops, whether you’re following up that afternoon or revisiting a decision weeks later. A good conversation should keep being useful after the meeting ends, and that’s exactly why we’ve built Notetaker.

we always try to ship sooner than something is ready doing this allows us to constantly build alongside real user feedback if you don't do this you can find yourself in this perfection mindset making very marginal improvements, and before you know it, a year has passed and nothing has shipped this is what happens to most startups, and exactly what you want to avoid ship fast, gather feedback, improve, ship again